Poetry Friday: Autumn Fires

I love autumn in New England. I love the crisp, cooler days, the colorful foliage, and the smell of apple-scented air. I used to enjoy taking my young daughter to a local orchard in October. We’d visit with the pigs and sheep, select a pumpkin or two to carve for Halloween, watch apples being pressed into cider, and eat delicious warm apple cider donuts. Yum!

When I was little, I enjoyed collecting shiny-shelled chestnuts…and the sound they made bonking on the ground as they fell from the chestnut tree across the street from my grandparents’ house. We kids used to rake up piles of fallen leaves, jump in them, and iron some of the most brightly colored ones between sheets of wax paper. Our parents--or my grandparents--would set piles of autumn leaves afire and we kids would watch as the smoke floated up into the air and drifted off like a wispy gray cloud. One thing I miss most about the season now is the smell of autumn leaves burning. It’s such an evocative scent.

Although summer returned to New England earlier this week for a last hurrah, I’m ready for fall…and the memory of autumn fires. So here is a classic by Robert Louis Stevenson for this Poetry Friday on the cusp of October.


AUTUMN FIRES
by Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens

And all up the vale,

From the autumn bonfires

See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over

And all the summer flowers,

The red fire blazes,

The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!

Something bright in all!

Flowers in the summer,

Fires in the fall!

Here is a poem I wrote for A Home for the Seasons, a collection about childhood days I spent at the home of my maternal grandparents, Michael Kozicki and Anna Chalupka Kozicka. Michael and Anna came to America from Poland in the early 20th century. They met in Boston, got married, and lived in Peabody, Massachusetts for all of their married lives. (Dzidzi is what we called my grandfather.)


AUTUMN FIRE
by Elaine Drabik Magliaro

Two tall maple trees grow

in front of my grandparents’ house.

In late October

they shed their golden crowns.

When the fallen leaves

curl up like little brown bear cubs,

we rake them into a pile

at the side of the street.

As dusk arrives

Dzidzi sets our harvest afire

with a single match.

We sit on wooden crates

at the sidewalk’s edge,

watch the brittle leaves

blossom into golden flames,

smell autumn’s pungent breath.

From the pyre summer rises,

a small gray ghost,

and drifts away

into the darkening sky.



The Poetry Friday Roundup is at AmoxCalli this week.